Is there a way to recover from an accidental "svn revert"?

Question

Hi all,

I managed to shoot myself in the foot this morning by doing the following:

1. Started working on a change to my project
2. Made a bunch of edits to a bunch of files
3. Realized that my approach was all wrong, and that I needed to start over
4. cd'd to the top level of my project and did a "svn --recursive revert ." to restore my local sandbox to its pre-changes state.
5. Howled in horror as I realized that there had been a number of other changes outstanding in my local sandbox, and I had just obliterated all of them. (the svn server had been down last Friday so I hadn't been able to check them in, and I had forgot about them over the weekend)

Fortunately in this case I had done an "svn diff > temp.txt" before leaving work on Friday, and the temp.txt file was still on my hard drive, so I was able to feed that file into "patch" and recover my lost changes.

But for my future reference (i.e. the next time I make the same dumb mistake)... is there any way to tell svn to undo an "svn revert"? Does svn keep a backup of the local/not-checked-in diffs anywhere?

Answer 1

No, absolutely NO.

If you say to Subversion it should revert a file, all changes are gone by the wind.

Only your memory can get them back.

Exception: New files you had added, will only lose their status "added", but the file will remain in this directory, only status is unknown("?")

Answer 2

Not really Subversion specific, but if you're working with Eclipse, you can try your luck in the local history.

Now, something a little bit more Subversion specific: if you don't want to make a branch for every change you do, you can keep a couple of trunk checked out locally (trunk-modif-1, trunk-modif-2...). Each "modification" is done on a separate tree and you only need to keep a list of which check out correspond to which modification.

Or you could use Git locally but I never tried it.

Answer 3

There is a solution... go to your recycle bin you'll find there the latest version of the deleted file. Tortoise "throwing" to the recycle bin every file that it revert.